As the US subprime mortgage crisis plays out, the ‘dual morality’ of its victims' treatment becomes stark. But, Randy Martin explains, bailing-out the banks while leaving defaulters to rot is just the latest in a 30 year campaign of ripping off the American working class

"Your apartments are nice and tidy, but the stairways are covered with shit. What can you call this but a cult of space?"

– some interesting reflections on space, ludic and insightful, from Chto Delat?/ What Is To Be Done.

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?Itemid=127&id=267&option=com_content&task=view

Reads very well with Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev's account of anti-privatisation/regen protests in St Petersburg elsewhere on metamute.org

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The UK’s health and social services have become tools of surveillance and control, with working class women the most vulnerable to state intervention. Madame Tlank reviews the State’s policies, targets and projects and uncovers the warped logic and fragmenting effects of marketised welfare

From Private Eye, the otherwise barely-reported story of the recent Treasury paper underlying the UK government's renewed commitment to more! bigger! better! PFI, which draws on the 'analysis' of PFI fee-farmers PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG etc.

    It has screwed scores of hospital budgets, snarled up the school building process and lumbered taxpayers with billions of pounds of hidden debts, yet the private finance initiative continues to thrive.  Why?

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity w

A majority of Royal Mail workers voted today for official acceptance of the stitch-up, sorry, settlement brokered by the Communication Workers Union, ending the recent cycle of strikes against the process leading to implementation of the EU directive on (selective - i.e.

This extract from an unfinished text by Angela Mitropoulos, posted on archive : s0metim3s (http://archive.blogsome.com/2007/08/07/indigenous-land/#comments), gives part of the historical background (which some European readers may have overlooked) to the current military-medical invasion of Aboriginal land in Australia's Northern Territory.  Most importantly, the text explains the concrete connection between intervention in the name of 'health' and 'ed

From New Left Review (http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2678) some solid statistical evidence -- particularly strong on intersections of national, municipal, private and foreign capital -- for a point that might have seemed to border on truism but apparently is not gasped in mainstream 'China studies: the expansion of Chinese industrial capitalism in the last 20 years can is broadly comparable to the same process in Europe and America in the 19th century, and speculation over notions like 'the paradoxes of market socialism' is useless.  (Anyone who doubted this s